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Hi Jesse, I think they are fine, the reason why is as follows: They are in the same related niche (I'm going off your examples) and they have been there for a while and if they've not hurt him yet and there are not thousands of them you may just cause more harm removing them and then have to explain why he has dropped in rankings. What you could look into if it bothers you is remove them but attempt to replace the link value so there is no drop. However as i said earlier they are in the same niche and seems to be okay, you can always work on other links/areas so it diluted the above links in their profile It's great to be proactive but don't be too scared of the Google and as long as the following is true you will be fine: Make your site (and links) for the user A user may go to - http://www.becomeabetterhunter.com and then want to buy some hunting equipment and so the link is in fact normal and fine. Hope it helps. Good luck!

Hi Adam, Not to point out something that is likely well taken-care of, but did the GA / Analytics code populate across the site? Also, is there any heavy JavaScript on the site, especially above analytics code, that might prevent analytics code from loading properly. We had this happen with a client a few years ago. We built custom analytics for this client (they did not want to run GA). Client placed our code in the footer. Client placed slow-loading CRO code in the header. CRO code took so long to load that people had often clicked away from the page they landed on before our code had had a chance to record their visit, as JavaScript generally loads in the same order as it's placed on the page. We had them move our little piece of code up to the top of the page. Problem was solved (in the mean time, we were recording a 20,000 visit loss each week!). I'm just wondering if this is a tracking issue since all search traffic, not just Google has been affected. It would be quite rare to find an issue that has the same effect at the same time to both Bing and Google's algos. They're similar, but they're not identical and Bing generally tends to take longer to respond to change than Google as well. Any chance you have raw server logs to compare analytics stats to?

Hi. I would be curious to know if anyone else has experienced something similar and recovered from Panda. How long did it take you? Did you manually remove the pages, set up 410s or 404s, or create 301s? I've been working on a site for sometime now which has lost a great of traffic since July 2013. Over the past 2 months, a process has gone underway to manually remove the URLs from the index. The index has been cut in half, but still not at what it was pre-penalty. About 20,000 more pages to figure out what needs to be removed before it reaches the level it was before the massive traffic drop. Any recovery or insight would be helpful.

You're probably not using google.ca. It ranks slightly lower on google.com.

It finally updated. The update ran parallel to Google's caching schedule and all the stuff I did in webmaster tools as well as linking/pinging/etc... didn't have any affect. Google's a just a fat donkey... you can crack the whip all day long but that ass ain't gonna move till it's ready to.

Thanks for this Jane, good to know that we're doing it right.. am still a little unsure why the metrics are identical but as you say it's better to be safe than sorry

Hi Kristina, I would say that while having both terms in the URL is good, there are _so _man more important places for those terms to be used, and so many more important ways in which they can be used to ensure that your site (and the right content) ranks for [marketing success] that you needn't worry about URL structure. The content of those two areas of your site and how they relate to each other are much more important.

Hi there, There's a bunch of conflicting information floating around about this, but the last thing I read from Google was that they no longer recommended using the canonical tag when implementing hreflang: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html See the greyed / crossed-out section and the note underneath. It was super helpful of them to not announce this in any way, but just edit that article. Keep in mind that the original was written in 2011, of course...

Hi Jason, I would definitely not canonicalise between the three+ URLs about one text unless those URLs contain identical information. Since they won't be identical (one will be plot, one characters, etc. as you say earlier in the thread), I would not canonicalise. You will result in content such as that on characters not being indexed or crawled. The site is therefore probably less likely to rank for queries like [othello characters] if the characters page has a canonical tag on it, pointing to the plot summary page. Without having seen the site or mock-ups, I believe you would be safe to use separate URLs for each area of study surrounding one topic. However, you could indeed put all this content on one page and use tabs to switch between the content, given that it is too long to fit nicely on one page. The tabs should be operated by CSS, and all the text (plot summary, characters, context) would be in the source code upon page load. People would click between tabs to read it. This is not considered cloaking or hiding content, although I would avoid doing this if the content for each section is particularly lengthy. I doubt it would get you in trouble, but if you are creating substantial content for each area of study, this would work well on separate URLs _without _canonicalising to one particular page, as per your original structure. Cheers, Jane

There are no Google penalties This is a little awkward to be sure of Roderick as there are manual and algorithmic penalties, the latter you won't be notified about. Can you tell me what you used to build the profile of backlinks to disavow? Based on what you say, this is where I would start looking. -Andy

Thanks Martijn much appreciated

No, not as long as it doesn't get overused. What Google doesn't want you doing is "Cane Beds | Cane Beds for sale | Buy Cane Beds" If you are refering to character count, Keep it as compact as possible, while still being readable. Looks like you have already done the research on what is popular and ranking, now you just need to implement in a SEF and user friendly format. Think of it this way; what would you click on if you were looking for a cane bed? If you arent sure, draft a few examples, and show them to someone else for a few opinions.

David's right, unfortunately - even in the insurance industry, you see sites pop in and out, beating the big aggregators and private companies for short periods. It doesn't happen very often anymore with the blue-chip terms ([car insurance], [health insurance], etc.) but for the second-tier you can still see examples like this. Google isn't perfect at killing spam yet. Keep in mind that some of the big algo updates regarding links in the past two years have not really been targeting spammers at all: they have been targeting otherwise legitimate businesses (from large corporations to "mom & pop shop" organisations) who've sought to use manipulative link dev tactics. The tactics that a lot of recent manual and algorithmic penalties have focused on are buying into link networks and schemes rather than outright automated, old-fashioned spam. You can still get rankings with blackhat / greyhat tactics and some of those rankings last a surprisingly long time. I am not saying that the sites above are outright spam at all - they are affiliates who'll get burned in the end if their strategies aren't watertight, and they all seem to be owned by QuoteSearcher Ltd. Even the big guys in insurance get burned regularly - I'll stay away from citing actual examples due to past experience with agency-based client work, but big brands would rise and fall all the time during the five years I worked in insurance SEO.

Hi Luke, As alrockn says, I would redirect the root domain of the duplicate blog to mainsite.com/blog. With the pages that have no duplicate on the main site, either find the likeliest match or redirect to mainsite.com/blog. When I say likeliest match, I mean that if any pages on the old blog seem a good fit with something on the main site, redirect them there. You may find none that fit any of the existing pages. If so, don't worry - I'd redirect those to the main site's blog. Cheers, Jane

Hi Edmond, Can you elaborate on what you mean by "2 - 3 filters" please? Do you mean something like choosing "bathroom" under "Space" and ending up with a URL like http://www.wayfair.com/Shop-The-Look/Bathroom/space? Thanks, Jane

Hi Zack, Just checking in to see if you had run any other tests to determine why this message might have appeared (e.g. a site crawl to find duplication / bad canonicalisation, etc.)? Let me know if you still need assistance. Cheers, Jane

If there is no relevant new location to 301 to and you are dealing with way too many files to individually 301 them, then you can simply delete them so Google will encounter the 404 error page and remove those files from the index. That being said, if there are any old files that actually rank for search queries and generate organic traffic to your site, then I would recommend at least 301'ing those if possible so you don't lose the traffic as a result of the page being removed altogether.

Ok, so we could canonical the first page in the pagination, that way any links to the pagination would flow juicy juice to the first page. That would make sense, since it would strengthen its ranking as a landing page as well. I think ill implement the canonical and get rid of the content on pagination anyways, just avoid the problem completely. Ace Marty!

PDG-Commerce

As far as I can see, if the content is exactly the same on both the .com and .co.uk sites and you intend to keep it this way for the forseeable future, then there is no point maintaining both. Put all your efforts into developing and maintaining the .com site. Not only will this ensure that you are able to build the authority of one domain, it will also ensure that all your social media activities will be for the one site rather than sharing both .com and .co.uk URLs. Alternatively, if you want to differentiate your content slightly for a global and a separate UK audience then hreflang across the.com and .co.uk sites is the way to go.